Many financial services related businesses, such as banking, brokerage and insurance companies, are looking for ways to provide their core services to customers across electronic delivery technologies. These businesses are developing software applications and architectures to allow customers to tap into the business's existing application software infrastructure and access information contained in existing databases. Creating the software applications and architectures typically includes development of presentation and interfacing logic. In general the presentation and interfacing logic allows access to the information by customers using different front-end delivery technology, such as Internet browsers, interactive voice response units (IVRs) and wireless application protocol (WAP) phones.
In most cases, the presentation and interfacing logic is developed redundantly for every delivery technology. As such, changes to the underlying services may result in additional software development for each delivery technology. Moreover, because the information is usually handled with static data structures, any additional information required by customers may lead to a change in all software components related to this functionality.
One possible solution to this problem involves the use of extensible markup language (XML) technology. The XML technology is easily configurable and provides an extensible data structure. In addition, XML may be configured to provide a mechanism for translating the data for the different delivery technologies. However, the complexity and broad applicability of XML, along with multiple differing implementations available make a solution directly utilizing XML technology difficult to implement and maintain.